The Reacher Guy

By Heather Martin

An exquisitely written and nuanced biography of an exceptional individual and writer who has created the # 1 international bestselling hero Jack Reacher, revered by dedicated and loyal readers worldwide.

Lee Child has a great public persona: he is gracious and generous with readers and fans. But Jim Grant is a reticent and very private man. 

This rags-to-riches literary and social biography is based principally on disarmingly frank personal conversations and correspondence with the author since 2016 and privileged access to archival materials. It consists almost entirely of original material, and is the nearest thing the world is likely to get to the autobiography he does not intend to write. 

There are a handful of great Lee Child/Reacher stories that have been recycled over and over again. They are so good that no one has bothered to look beyond them. This book revisits (and sometimes revises) those irresistible stories, but goes back further and digs deeper. The emphasis on chronology, accuracy and specificity is unprecedented.  

The Lee Child origin myth is much loved. But mostly it sees him springing fully formed from the brow of Granada Television. There are glancing references to Aston Villa and the schoolyard, but no one has examined the social and historical detail or looked closely at where Lee really came from: the people, places and period.

This is the first time someone has described the Lee Child arc: from peaceful obscurity in the Yorkshire Dales and Upstate New York to cult figure, no. 1 in America, rock star, celebrity and publishing institution through to backlash, the changing zeitgeist, and intimations of retirement. The analysis of the emotional power and significance of Lee’s work in the final chapters—the themes of happiness, addiction, dependency, loneliness, and existential absurdity—and the first-hand retrospective accounts of his life and second-act career are all exclusive to this definitive biography.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pegasus Books
• Release date: Sep 29, 2020
• ISBN: 9781643135878

Book preview

1

The Library

His whole life was a visit.

The Midnight Line, 2017

He passed it every time they went to the library on Boroughgate, which during the holidays when he was dumped with his grandparents in Otley was about once a week. It was his grandmother who took him there first. She was a great reader, he told me. ‘She only had about nine books, but she used the library, as was typical.’

She held his hand as they turned left out of the house and walked downhill past the biscuit factory and the tannery towards Kirkgate, a continuation of Queens Terrace and Station Road across busy Burras Lane. When he was older he ran ahead with his brothers, the middle one of three in those days, impatient to duck on to the cobbled lane to press his face up against the cast-iron railings of the churchyard. His parents had been married there in All Saints Parish Church, built in Norman times on Anglo-Saxon foundations, on 5 March 1949.

Later he would become famous for being tall. Other things too, but being tall was a big part of it. Tall and fair-haired and blue-eyed. Hair that was dirty blond. Eyes that could blink and come back different, like changing the channel, from a happy show to some bleak documentary about prehistorical survival a million years ago. Even back then he had a reputation – everyone could see he was bigger and stronger than his brothers. But he was only a child, and big as he was, the object of his attention – at six feet – towered over him. Literally, since it had four diagonally symmetrical towers, one on each corner, castellated and crenellated and embattled, connected by parapets and surrounded by eroded headstones buried deep in the emerald grass, like something out of a picture-book edition of King Arthur or Robin Hood or the Canterbury Tales. It was the kind of thing a boy might dream of having in his back garden, if he had a back garden, rather than a paved yard just big enough to string a washing line from one side fence to the other.

He hardly needed to go to the library. There were stories right there on his path, and all sorts of questions to be answered. Life was full of suspense.

Did he wonder what ‘burras’ meant, or whether the Queen had once visited the terrace that was named for her? Did he know about the Vikings who had been there before him, who said ‘kirk’ and ‘gate’ instead of ‘church’ and ‘street’? He was never a trainspotter, nor a stamp collector, but had he always collected words?

Certainly by then he could read. He’d taught himself, eager to catch up with his older brother who was two years ahead of him and already at school, so had eavesdropped jealously on his mother as she helped her firstborn learn his letters and later practised by reading the back of his father’s newspaper at the breakfast table. The first whole sentence he decoded was: ‘Manchester closes down.’ He’d taught himself to write, too. His signature touch was to add extra crossbars to the uppercase ‘E’ so it looked like a millipede bisected lengthwise. It wasn’t vanity. He just thought the number was optional. It wasn’t as though it was maths.

With a little effort, he would have been able to decipher the words carved in slate on the south side of this graveyard gothic monument:

IN MEMORY

OF THE UNFORTUNATE MEN

WHO LOST THEIR LIVES WHILE ENGAGED IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE

BRAMHOPE TUNNEL OF THE LEEDS AND THIRSK RAILWAY

FROM 1845 TO 1849.

THIS TOMB IS ERECTED AS A MEMORIAL

AT THE EXPENSE OF JAMES BRAY ESQ., THE CONTRACTOR, AND OF THE

AGENTS, SUB-CONTRACTORS AND WORKMEN EMPLOYED THEREON.

It had come as a shock. To discover that the fairy-tale castle was a scaled-down replica of a railway tunnel, and was actually a tomb. Where dead people lived. If that wasn’t a contradiction. A grisly place, inhabited by ghosts. Not that he was scared or anything. He wasn’t the type to be scared.

But who were these unfortunate men and how had they lost their lives? Was it all at once, as the result of a single spectacular catastrophe, or one by one, at the hands of some sinister evil force? Was this the very same line that ran past the top of his grandparents’ road, where he and his brothers would go to play, hanging out in the dank underpass and listening to the deafening roar of the steam trains or watching them thunder by like fire-breathing dragons from the footbridge overhead?

Then beneath this factual introduction and harder to read, in a cursive font rather than block capitals:

I am a Stranger and a Sojourner with you: give me a possession of a Burying-Place with you, that I may bury my Dead out of my sight. [Genesis 23:4] Or those Eighteen upon whom the Tower in Siloam fell and slew them: think ye that they were sinners above all the men in Jerusalem? I tell you, Nay: but except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish. [Luke 13:4]

This raised a whole new set of questions. Who was this mysterious Stranger newly arrived in town, and what was a Sojourner, and who was it that he needed to bury, and why was he so appealing? Had the unnamed Eighteen been building the tower when it fell and slew them, and was this how the railway workers too had died? Was Siloam connected to Bramhope? Where did sin come into it, and what was sin anyway, and was that the promise of retribution in the final resounding phrase, and if so who was going to deliver it and make right all the wrongs?

He would have to wait for the answers but he was hardwired to want to know. Maybe he would find out at the library. If he ever got there. There was so much to see on the way.

No doubt it was here his love of history was born. There was an intimation of fate in the coincidental connections between these everyday heroes of the Industrial Revolution and this early Christian church and his parents and the railway, leading out of town over the Wharfedale Viaduct to Harrogate and Leeds and the Wild West and beyond. The record-breaking tunnel, the longest on the historic North Eastern Railway system, was an architectural folly whose form (he felt inexplicably betrayed by this) belied its function. It was rumoured to have been made longer than necessary for the amenity of landowner William Rhodes, who conceived of the tallest tower on its north portal as a belvedere that would afford him a view of his expansive estate.

Some of this history was documented on the churchyard railings:

The greatest challenge was to cut the Bramhope Tunnel 25ft high through 2 miles 243 yards of rock at depths of up to 290ft. Some 2,300 men and 400 horses were involved in this work, all being subject to sudden rock falls, subsidence, flooding and accidental death.

Even as a boy he would have lingered over the phrase accidental death and its self-absolving abnegation of responsibility, and intuited that vengeance was called for.

It would have bothered him that the Bramhope Memorial lists the names of twenty-three casualties, whereas other sources cite twenty-four. He had a thing about numbers and liked them to be exact, for their own sake. Numbers were either right or wrong. But this time there were lives at stake. If one man had been missed, then how many more? Twenty-three was a neat percentage of 2300 and therefore compelling, but what if it was fiction, what if it was wrong?

Years later, in 2017, when I went to see Lee speak at the Old Peculier Crime Festival in Harrogate, I told him of my plan to take a bus to Otley for the day.

‘Make sure you visit the library,’ he said. ‘I read a lot of books there.’

So I did. While he was being fêted by fans and fawned over by billionaire sponsors, I sat and read This Little Town of Otley, spanning the mid-nineteenth century to the Second World War. Harold Walker, the author, was a retired printer who as a boy would happily forgo an iced bun to save the penny it cost to buy the latest ‘blood and thunder’ (the adventures of Buffalo Bill or Sexton Blake, detective). Otley was a market town that traded in stories.

I have always been fascinated by the Friday Market, and the various characters who attended. I well remember such wags as ‘Pot Bob’ Morrison from Knaresborough, who could juggle with half a dozen dinner plates better than many a music hall artiste, and whose quick repartee always kept the crowds amused; Harry Sharp, the ‘Oilcloth King’, from Bradford; and ‘Cudball’ Cooper, the cattle ‘doctor’ from Yeadon. There were vendors of patent medicines that were claimed to cure all ills, from corns to stones in the kidney, and whose rheumatism pills, if taken regularly, would land sufferers halfway up the centre of Chevin, before they even knew they had started; also ‘Eye Lickers’ who, for free, licked incipient cataracts from the eyes of anyone so afflicted, were frequent visitors and always drew a crowd of sightseers.

It sounded like the Macondo of One Hundred Years of Solitude – the heavy gypsy with the untamed beard and sparrow hands who so flamboyantly exhibited the magnet and magnifying glass in a clearing in the Colombian jungle would not have been out of place in this West Yorkshire plaza. In a contest between the magic of ice and the miracle of the Eye Lickers it wasn’t clear who would win. But like Aureliano Buendía, the boy who would one day become Lee Child had breathed in stories like he breathed in air, or maybe – since the area was famed for its spa towns – it was something in the water. It was as though the storytelling gene had been passed directly to him, across the oceans and down through the ages.

The library was an airy structure of brick and glass, with data sockets and charging points embedded in the carpeted floor. I went back to the desk and asked if they had any pictures of how it used to be in the 1950s. Oh, said the librarian, who had grown up in a house on Station Road, facing Queens Terrace, it was on a different site then. She pointed me in the direction of Boroughgate. No. 4 was now a hardware store with a brash blue frontage and a colourful assortment of brooms and buckets arrayed on the pavement outside. The owners sent me out the back to take photographs, explaining that the library had encompassed both floors of a terraced house of the same soot-blackened sandstone as Queens Terrace, but older and more austere, without the assertive extravagance of the bay window. It must have felt like reading in the comfort of home, the dimensions so much more intimate and grandmotherly than the upgraded institutional splendour of its modern-day replacement.

By this point Lee had lived in (North) America for twenty years. He lamented the disappearance of libraries and feared the demise of bookshops, and stockpiled books against a rainy day like others hoarded cans of beans. (He hoarded those as well, along with tins of sardines and chicken noodle soup.) On two occasions I saw him leave a bookstore not with a bag but a cardboard box. I didn’t offer to carry it for him, but once I opened the door of the cab and then stood on the 42nd Street sidewalk and watched as he sped away from the Grand Hyatt towards Central Park.

There were upwards of four thousand books in his Manhattan apartment alone. I’m not sure they included a bible (he’d read the major religious texts at school, and never again since). But if in pensive scholarly mood he had been moved to consult a gloss of Genesis 23:4 it might have felt weirdly like looking in a mirror.

I am a Stranger and a Sojourner, he might have read aloud to himself: ‘one living out of his own country, dwelling in a land in which he is not naturalised; one whose origin is foreign, and whose period of residence is uncertain’.

2

The Wharfedale

He was multiplying big numbers in his head.

Die Trying, 1998

In 2016, the undisputed king of thriller writers, courted by the establishment and giving lectures at Oxford and Cambridge (which had rejected him forty years before), Lee would argue that storytelling was vital to our survival. The ability to make things up helped us outwit our enemies and inspired us with the courage to stand up to them. He made a persuasive intellectual case for the human importance of his chosen profession.

But however good the stories, man shall not live by words alone. Even Lee Child needs unlimited coffee and a bowl of sugar snaps, and was once (that time was vivid in his memory) motivated by the need to put food on the table. Yet for approximately one hundred years the little town of Otley came close. Perhaps they’d caught sight of the future in a crystal ball, or it was down to enterprise and ingenuity, but somehow the town’s joiners and metalworkers seemed to sense what was coming.

Otley had always traded in cattle, even before this was sanctioned by Henry III in 1222, and was deemed by Walker to be ‘excellently supplied with the common necessaries of life’, among them some very tall tales. But it was only towards the end of the Industrial Revolution, with the tanning trade in decline, that the town made its indelible mark on the world.

The fifteenth-century invention of the Gutenberg Press was a turning point in history, heralding the advent of the Modern Age and the founding of the global village. By enabling mechanical reproduction of the Bible it led directly to the Reformation and the proliferation of Protestantism. The next significant advance in print technology, according to historian Paul Wood (Otley and the Wharfedale Printing Machine), was ‘conceived in an 1830s joiner’s shop of a small Yorkshire market town with a population of only 3,000 souls’.

The man credited with the cast-iron, steam-powered Wharfedale Press is machine-maker David Payne, recruited by cabinetmaker and founding father of the industry William Dawson to develop a flat-bed printing press. Payne was a visionary and a dreamer, a true son of Otley. He had previously devised a machine to drain land, which he demonstrated to one of the village farmers. The farmer was so astonished, writes Walker, that he swore young Payne ‘was in league with the Devil, otherwise he could not have made a contraption like that!’

If the Gutenberg Press was responsible for the democratisation of knowledge, it is the nostalgically named Wharfedale (as local lore has it; there are rival claims) – harking back to the pastoral and hinting at the oral tradition – that we have to thank for the rise of modern publishing, the handing down of the story of the Eye Lickers, and the all-conquering dominance of the bestseller.

By definition the bestseller is about statistics. Lee’s trajectory is ablaze with them, each eclipsing the last. ‘In its first six days on sale in the UK,’ said Transworld’s Larry Finlay in November 2016, celebrating Reacher’s twenty-first outing at the Haymarket Hotel in Piccadilly, ‘Night School sold one copy every ten seconds, that’s one copy every ten seconds, six copies every minute, three hundred and thirty-three every hour or eighteen thousand copies a day, that’s over forty-eight thousand copies in six days.’ (Its closest competitors that week had managed fifty thousand in the entire year.) He rounded off this Reacheresque riff on big numbers with a heavily italicised prediction sublime in its confidence: ‘It will be the biggest-selling adult hardback novel of 2016, bar none.’ (And so it was.) All that was missing was a hat-tip to the Wharfedale, which by allowing continuous sheet printing and multiplying the output of the Gutenberg tenfold (from two hundred to two thousand pages per hour), set the whole euphoric process in train.

‘The sun never sets on Reacher,’ said agent Darley Anderson in 2013, blithely deploying the rhetoric of imperialism when Killing Floor was published in Mongolia. It was a delicate moral balancing act for Lee, wanting to annihilate the opposition statistically speaking, wanting to crush them underfoot as he once put it, to hold rock steady at no. 1 without sacrificing the principles that made him who he was. He was a juggernaut, but a juggernaut with a conscience. And it could be argued – he’d done so cogently – that like William Dawson, by generating a profitable market for the industry he was keeping a community afloat.

Everywhere in Otley I saw connections with Lee. But strictly speaking he’d never been there. ‘Yorkshire’s my place,’ I heard him say to a television interviewer in Harrogate. But that wasn’t Lee Child speaking. His place was New York. Otley belonged to James D. Grant, middle name Dover, after his maternal grandfather. Commonly known as Jim.

Jim’s parents had met and married in Otley, but not so his grandparents. Harry Dover Scrafton and Audrey Leider Scott were natives of South Shields in County Durham (now Tyne and Wear), where Jim’s mother was born in 1926. Harry had trained as a naval draughtsman and landed his dream job in a shipyard weeks before the Wall Street Crash. He was ‘the only real human among my immediate ancestors’, Lee wrote to me. ‘Drank a little, gambled a little, smoked a lot.’ That was what had first attracted him to smoking, the smell he remembered from the time and place he felt most loved as a child. He wasn’t put off by an anecdote recounted by his grandmother, an early memory from before the First World War, when an enlightened health worker had visited her school, stood on the stage, whipped out a cigarette and lit it, holding a pristine white handkerchief in front of the burning tip. Brandishing the stained cloth before the chastened assembly of young girls, with an informed diligence ahead of his time, he had warned of the devastation they would wreak upon their lungs should they succumb to this self-destructive habit. Audrey didn’t smoke. But Otley had been active in the manufacture of tobacco.

Harry Dover Scrafton was bowed but not broken when faced with redundancy from the bankrupt shipyard in 1932. He was offered a job in the Post Office Telephones drawing office on the understanding that there wasn’t a vacancy and he would have to wait, while digging ditches. The digging dragged on for five years. He moved to Otley in 1938 when the opening finally came up, producing a small telecoms mast in the 1950s before becoming a teacher at the Post Office design school in the suburb of Kineholme, where he remained until retirement in 1965. The young Audrey Grant, Jim’s mother, was bitter about being yanked out of her South Shields high school and sent to an inferior school in Otley. She never got over it.

Lee’s methodology is distinctively organic: he feels, as much as thinks, his books into being. Like a glassblower or metalworker he has to get it right first time while the material is still hot. Yet his pragmatic approach to getting the job done is supremely mechanical. He starts each new book on 1 September without fail, and prides himself on delivering a reliable product in good working order precisely on schedule. ‘They know I’ll deliver,’ he said, referring to both publishers and readers; ‘I’m always on time’ (a punctuality that carried over into his personal life too). ‘I’m never late.’ It wasn’t just timing but content too. The people demand Reacher books and, like clockwork, that’s what he gives them: Lee is to book production what the Wharfedale was to continuous sheet printing, a magisterial machine spitting out bestsellers like the press spat out pages.

Even his terms of praise, his images of beauty, draw on the metaphoric radiance of the machine. Something that marries form to function and does the job it’s intended to do as well as it can be done. Something that works. Which renders the axiomatic adverb ‘well’ entirely superfluous. This example is from 2013 novella High Heat:

At nearly seventeen Reacher was like a brand new machine, still gleaming and dewy with oil, flexible, supple, perfectly coordinated, like something developed by NASA and IBM on behalf of the Pentagon.

He emphasises the importance of the ‘narrative engine’, aspires to a ‘propulsive prose’, and if you’re lucky he’ll describe your writing as ‘solid’.

Lee had more in common with Harry Scrafton than his middle name and a taste for tobacco. Both had been laid off due to ‘economic restructuring’ and forced to start afresh. We were sitting in the lobby of New York’s Grand Hyatt in July 2017 taking a breather from the annual jamboree that is ThrillerFest when out of nowhere he said, looking down at his manicured hands, ‘I keep my fingernails long to show I’ve got out of manual labour.’ Not for him a five-year sentence with a spade. In conquering the New World through the well-oiled machine of his literary avatar, James Dover Grant was avenging the misfortune inflicted on his beloved maternal grandfather, doing battle on his behalf with the soulless spectre of Wall Street.

Traces endure in the handwritten first draft of Killing Floor, donated in 2018 to the British Archive for Contemporary Writing at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. ‘I remember at the time hearing about this crash on Wall Street that took away all the folks’ money,’ muses the old barber in chapter nine. But this detail has been erased from the published version, along with the barber’s misreading of the event as a train crash.

Paul Wood estimates that the Wharfedale had a functional lifetime of a hundred years. The same was true of the Otley railway, a casualty of the Beeching Cuts in 1965. Lee would accept the round hundred when it came to longevity. He didn’t expect or even want to be remembered. So many others had been forgotten – why should he be any different? For a while in Kirkby Lonsdale his mortgage had been so catastrophically large that the only books he could afford were from the 10p section of the used bookstore: 1950s books, popular in their day and widely distributed through book clubs – ‘all obscure, all forgotten now, all great’. He doubted his books would attain the status of enduring classics, once the massive machinery of publicity had ground to a halt. Success was fleeting. ‘Mickey Spillane was gigantic, but who reads him now?’ He was content to be absorbed in the spirit of literature.

Yet there was no denying he worked, as a writer, in both senses of the verb.

Through the rise and fall of empire the transcendent natural beauty of Otley remained surprisingly intact. In the early eighteenth century the landscape inspired J. M. W. Turner, whose patron Walter Fawkes (a descendant of his seditious namesake) lived across the valley from the Chevin, a mountainous ridge that stands sentinel over the town.

A much photographed view of the Chevin looks south up the gentle incline of Station Road, favouring the stone houses of Queens Terrace on the right, with the distant white dot of Jenny’s Cottage (named for the shepherd’s wife who fed and watered visitors) glinting against the rising green backdrop. No. 29, where Jim’s grandparents lived, is one of the last houses in the row, on the last street before the railway line, and Jim and his brothers would frequently cut across Birdcage Walk, over or under the track (now the Leeds bypass), to climb up the hill. ‘It was an easy climb,’ Lee said, ‘for a boy.’ He didn’t mention the Roman Road along the top, only the spectacular Frying-pan Rock and a massive bomb crater.

Sometimes on their way down the brothers would linger by the end house on the terrace, where the neighbour kept chickens in her fenced-off garden: forty-nine of them, not a single chicken more, since if you had fifty they were requisitioned for rations.

Jim’s grandparents moved to West Busk Lane after Harry retired. It was a simple end-of-terrace house on the edge of town with sweeping views of the valley beyond. Jim went back to Otley in 1994 to bury his grandmother – Harry had died a decade earlier. So she never knew Lee Child then, I said, when he told me this, and he said no, which was sad, because she would have been ‘very happy about it’.

He’d inherited three of her books. It wasn’t until two years after my visit that I discovered one of these was This Little Town of Otley. The second was A Century of Thrillers: From Poe to Arlen, with a foreword by James Agate; the name SCRAFTON was written in pencil on the first page and the pen and ink frontispiece showed ‘the foul fiend, in his ain shape, sitting on the laird’s coffin’. The third was his own mother’s Collected Shakespeare from her schooldays.

David Payne died in 1888. His headstone reads: ‘Inventor of the Wharfedale Machine’. But it fell to Paul Wood a century later to write the epitaph for ‘the simple mechanical device which had sustained a community for so long’. ‘What better than to print Dawson, Payne & Elliott’s own description at the end: The Wharfedale; Simplicity, durability and long life.’

Reacher fans might feel their hero is better encapsulated by the more lyrical promotional eulogy afforded the ‘Patented Improved Wharfedale Printing Machine’:

Unequalled for Strength and Efficiency, Simplicity, Finish and Durability.

3

A Tale of Three Grandfathers

Reacher remembered his grandfather pretty well.

Second Son, 2011

There is a black-and-white photograph of the infant James Grant sitting on a wooden bench between his two grandfathers. Lee isn’t sure where it was taken. He’s around two years old, but it wasn’t Coventry: ‘the brickwork looks wrong’ (he’d once read a book about geometric patterns in medieval English brickwork). The backdrop is a plain brick wall, like something drawn by the painstaking hand of a child, without a single straight line. It must have been a special occasion to bring both sides of the family together, for Audrey to dress her second son so prettily in soft, white Peter Pan collar and pristine white ankle socks in the manner of a cosseted prince. A christening? But no: ‘None of us was christened or baptised – we’re all heathens in that regard.’ Maybe that’s how all middle-class mothers dressed their boys, back in the day.

‘I remember stories about a joint vacation on the east coast of Yorkshire,’ Lee wrote.

His hair is combed in the same style as today, flopping to one side over his forehead, but his legs are chubby and too short to reach the ground.

From what he’s told me it’s easy to guess which grandfather is which. On the left Harry Scrafton exudes warmth, his thick hair brushed in glossy waves. He is dapper, in dark-framed spectacles, a lightweight, light-coloured suit with wide lapels and turn-ups, and a monochrome tie featuring a jolly geometric pattern. He is upright and alert, eyes to the camera, body turned protectively towards his grandson. He is holding the little boy’s right hand in his own, resting lightly in his lap, perhaps encouraging him to sit still. James is solemn. On the right is John Grant. Even seated he is an imposing man, straight hair swept severely back off his brow, wearing a sweater and tie under his suit and a complex expression: the beginnings of a smile cut short by a frown or grimace, as though he were looking into the sun. On the bench is an old bellows camera of the type that folds flat when not in use. There are two pens smartly aligned in his breast pocket, clips facing outwards with regulation precision. His long pen-like legs are stiff and angled oddly to the side. His left leg, furthest from James, looks thinner and stiffer and straighter than the other.

If he looks ill at ease, it’s because he was. He’d spent twenty years of his life in pain. Then things got better. The next twenty years had been merely uncomfortable.

James felt safe with Grandma and Grandad Scrafton. He liked that they were ‘exclusively ours’ and thought it weird that his Granpop (John) and Granny (Winnie) could be grandparents to two separate sets of children. But the earliest memory he can pinpoint takes him back to Northern Ireland.

It was 28 October 1957. His first time in an airplane. The day before his third birthday, when it was still free for him to fly. They were going to Belfast to visit John and Winnie, who lived in Cherryvalley at 13 Kingsway Avenue. The surplus DC-3 aircraft took off from Elmdon airport in Birmingham. It wasn’t pressurised so flew at low altitude, but ‘travelling on a warplane felt like heaven’. Plus he got boiled sweets on a silver platter when they were still scarce (even more so in the sober Grant household). James was paralysed with joy. All this, and free sweets too? It was a taste of the high life he would never forget.

Sixty years and countless airplanes later (peaking at seventy in 2006 alone), over lunch on East 22nd Street near his old place opposite the Flatiron, he would tell me how ironic it was that the richer he became the less often he had to pay for things. Tickets for the new Broadway hit Hamilton were almost impossible to come by and theatregoers were shelling out $2000 a pop for the privilege. Lee had been the night before; it hadn’t cost him a cent. That very day, during a meeting to discuss a deal with iTunes, Apple had pressed a gleaming new-issue iPhone into his hands because they were mock-horrified by the obsolescence of his old one (considerably newer than mine). ‘It’s good to be king,’ he smiled, polishing off the last of his croque-monsieur and looking around for the white-jacketed stewards and sweets.

The Grants had a double-fronted detached house with a door in the middle at the top of a rise, across the Gilnahirk Road from the more salubrious Cherryvalley Park and with a view of the surrounding hills. The approach took you over a modest stretch of the River Lagan that runs from Slieve Croob in County Down to the Irish Sea, and past a red-brick mansion called Elsinore. There was a row of low-rise single-storey shops with a cracked tarmac forecourt that appeared to have changed little since the 1950s. A butcher, a barber, a pharmacy, a greengrocer, a dry cleaner: the only adornments a bright red pillar box and a pocked and rusted cast-iron bollard dated 1918 marking the ‘parliamentary and municipal boundary of Belfast’. Kingsway Avenue was the next turn on the left, after the petrol station on the corner.

John (No Middle Name) Grant was born in 1890 in segregated East Belfast, ‘a puritanical self-denying Northern Irish Protestant’, the seventh and youngest child of Sam and Jane Grant, whose eldest son was the first (known) James Grant, Lee’s namesake. There were three further sons, all of whom emigrated to Canada. All three volunteered in the First World War and all three died at Ypres. Little is known of their two sisters.

Sam, Lee’s great-grandfather, was a miller. He was able to recognise and sign his own name but could otherwise neither read nor write. Jane could read, but had little chance to do so. Her job was to separate the grain from the chaff. She needed the chaff to feed the hens. She needed the hens to feed her seven children, and any surplus eggs she sold to raise money, if not for books then at least for book learning. Eventually she saved enough to send her youngest son to school. Thus John Grant, Lee’s grandfather, became the first in his family to receive a formal education.

I like to think of this strong, determined, literate woman as a pioneer, beating a metaphorical path to the library for her future great-grandson.

When the United Kingdom declared war against Germany on 4 August 1914, John was twenty-four years old. His schooling had won him a white-collar job with the Irish railroad company but he was ready to fight. There was no conscription. It was before partition. The situation was politically sensitive. John volunteered, as Lee himself would have done in similar historical circumstances. But ‘like the ANZACs, the Irish were not entirely trusted’ and were trained ‘indefinitely’. Then one day John was sent to Gallipoli.

Lee knew I was Australian. ‘I know Gallipoli is central to the Australian origin myth,’ he observed dispassionately, ‘but data-wise the casualty rate was one-tenth that of the Western Front.’ Gallipoli was a ‘clusterfuck’ (a word he used mostly to describe his own schedule), but the Western Front was ‘quantitatively worse – the numbers don’t lie’.

Corporal John Grant landed at Suvla Bay as part of the 10th (Irish) Division of Kitchener’s New Army. But the enemy held the high ground. The bay had strong natural defences. John didn’t make it across the four miles of graveyard to the firing line. He didn’t even make it across the exposed coastal plain and the dried-up salt lake to the knee-high prickly underbrush beyond. He barely had time to discern the puffs of smoke on the hills. Some time on the night of 6 August 1915 he stepped out of a dinghy into the surf and within seconds was machine-gunned in the leg. His war was over. He was triaged on the beach, but his wound was assumed to be fatal. He was left lying where he’d been treated. He wasn’t alone. But forty-eight hours later, when the burial parties came out, John was one of the few to be found still alive. He was a hard guy to kill.

From Gallipoli he was evacuated to a hospital in Manchester with the other legless wounded. They were taught to sew. Their first job was to darn the bullet holes in their own uniforms so these could be redistributed to active troops. They were still serving soldiers. There was no room for self-pity.

A year later John Grant was discharged on medical grounds. The abscess on his stump had failed to heal. It went on failing to heal for another twenty years. From 1915 through to 1935 he changed his own dressings, daily.

He didn’t complain about it. Literally millions of men were in the same situation. He wasn’t – and didn’t consider himself to be – in any way exceptional. It wasn’t a thing you could complain about.

John was a big man, at least six foot, and in his youth had been strong, too. By the time he became a grandfather he was hunched with pain and physically distorted. He was given an articulated wooden leg as a government benefit but as he became less mobile and grew heavier the leg kept breaking at the joint. Finally he threw it away in disgust and made his own replacement out of a solid table leg, with no fragile joint to let him down, and then ‘he would stump around on that’. It was the kind of thing a child would notice.

When asked to name his favourite of his own fictional villains at the New York launch of Reacher no. 22 in November 2017, Lee cited Hook Hobie from Tripwire, published in 1999. This came as no surprise to his readers; they tended to agree. What did surprise them was that in writing this character he was thinking of his own grandfather.

‘My grandfather wasn’t quite that bad,’ he said. But like John Grant, Hook Hobie was forced to deal with that clumsy prosthetic twice a day every day for the rest of his life. Which made him ‘sad and pathetic’, yet was also ‘his humanity, his redeeming feature’. There the resemblance ended, for while the cartoonish hook hand is the objective correlative of evil, the wooden leg was an accident of fate. ‘My grandfather had to live sixty-two years with that disability,’ Lee said. ‘We care at the time, but we soon forget.’

The grandson never forgot. The forbidding patriarchal figure who loomed so large in his childhood was never far from his mind. Two of his novels are dedicated to soldiers and The Midnight Line illuminates the harsh realities of extreme disfigurement to such devastating effect that New York Times critic Janet Maslin summed it up as ‘the one that breaks your heart’. In 2011’s novella Second Son (an explicitly autobiographical title) Lee recycles the elements of John Grant’s story, filtered through the heightened sensibility of thirteen-year-old Jack. Like John, Laurent Moutier ‘volunteered immediately’. On returning to Paris ‘with a chestful of medals and no scars longer than his middle finger, which was statistically the same thing as completely unscathed’, he finds that his furniture-repair business has been commandeered to make wooden legs for ‘an army of cripples’. Which he does, ‘out of parts of tables bought up cheap from bankrupt restaurants’. ‘It was entirely possible that there were veterans in Paris stumping around on the same furniture they had once dined off.’

Was this what James once imagined to have happened? Did he wonder if the hungry Grant family had come home one day to the house on Kingsway Avenue to find a three-legged table listing in the kitchen like some kind of Allied vessel that had taken a life-threatening hit?

Harry Scrafton was twelve years younger than John Grant, and died younger too (John went on stomping around until the grand old age of eighty-eight). His was a shorter life, but a sweeter one. He smoked. He didn’t have to contend with a recalcitrant table leg, he wasn’t haunted by the grim failure of Gallipoli, the sounds and smells of Suvla Bay weren’t seared and scorched on his brain. It was always going to be easier for a little boy to snuggle up to the grandfather with two good legs and a twinkle in his eye, with his cosy, tobacco-warmed clothes, and it’s no coincidence that Harry was seated on his right on that sunlit bench and John on his left, ever so slightly separate, no more than a couple of millimetres if you were to measure it with a ruler, but far enough that he might as well be sitting on his own.

That barely converted DC-3 warplane was more than Lee’s earliest date-stamped memory. It was the cornerstone of his personal origin myth, and a symbol of the most startling change from his generation to the next. ‘For us, the war was still so present and coloured every aspect of life. For them it means nothing. It’s entirely absent.’ I knew he was thinking then, like the stoic Moutier on his deathbed, of his own ‘beautiful mop-haired’ daughter.

In 2014, on the one-hundredth anniversary of the declaration of war, Lee contributed to the online project ‘Letter to an Unknown Soldier’, inspired by the statue of a soldier reading a letter that stands on Platform 1 of London’s Paddington Station (just along from Paddington Bear). Lee’s letter was one of 21,439. This is what he wrote:

You don’t know me yet, but I have things to tell you. You’re about to go back, and I’m sorry to say it’s going to be worse than ever this time. You’re going to be wounded, I’m afraid. Very badly. But you’ll survive. You’ll make it home. You have to, you see. Forty years from now you’ll become my grandfather.

Not that home will be a bed of roses. Wages will be down, and three men will fight for every job. At times you’ll be cold, and at times you’ll be hungry. And if you say anything, they’ll come at you with truncheons.

And then it will get worse. There are some lean years coming. And I’m sorry, but along the way you’ll realise: the war didn’t end. It was just a lull. You’ll have to do it all again. This time your son will have to go, not you. You don’t know him yet, but you will. But don’t worry. He’ll get back too. He has to. You’re my grandfather, remember?

And I’ll be born in a different world. There will be jobs for everyone. They’ll be building houses. You’ll go to the doctor whenever you want. I’ll go to school. I’ll get free orange juice. You’ll get free walking sticks. But most of all we’ll get peace. Finally, year after year. I will never go to war, you know. I will never have to. The first time I go to France will be a trip with my school.

So go back now, and play your tiny part in the great drama, and sustain yourself by knowing: it comes out well in the end. I promise.

Lee Child

His autobiography in 277 words.

Where there was pathos, humour was never far behind. John and Winnie Grant had an old Ford Anglia, like the Harry Potter car. John removed the front passenger seat and sat in the back with his wooden leg stretched out. Winnie drove, but she was a small woman and her legs couldn’t reach the pedals. So her husband added a couple of wooden blocks, no doubt chopping up some redundant item of furniture to achieve his ever-practical end. They were an eccentric pair and made a funny sight driving around Cherryvalley.

When asked by the New Statesman in June 2017 for the best piece of advice he’d ever received, Lee said: ‘My Irish granddad used to say: Spend your money before it runs out. I’m sure he was joking, but it’s advice I have followed.’

Over the years there would be many more photographs of similar composition: Lee at the centre of a triad, dressed in black rather than white, no Peter Pan collar and no laces in his shoes, framed by a couple of adoring fans. But so far as I know there are none, apart from this, where he is the shortest of the three and his legs don’t reach the ground.

4

Coventry

I didn’t foresee any major difficulties.

Killing Floor, 1997

James Dover Grant was born in Coventry on 29 October 1954. But he doesn’t self-identify as a Coventrian, however strenuously the city might claim him as one of its own.

‘I’m from Birmingham,’ he’d say, with the regularity of a stock refrain in an ancient epic.

Still, it was where his education began.

‘I had gone through a lot of unpleasant education,’ Reacher says in Killing Floor. ‘Not just in the army. Stretching right back into childhood.’

When I asked what he remembered about Coventry, Lee told me a story.

He was outside in the street with his older brother Richard. Which was where they usually were, as kids. Which was normal, since their parents always did what was normal, since normal was all they cared about. The boys were completely untended. They would have breakfast, leave the house, find some bombsite to play on and maybe unearth an old gun or a grenade or two, and not come back till nightfall. ‘This from the time I could walk.’

That unfettered freedom to go where he wanted when he wanted, the obverse of a 1950s brand of neglect, was something he had never forgotten.

On this particular day Nicky from the next street was tormenting Richard. Which was also normal. Richard was no lionheart. He was a dork, a geek, extremely bright, weedy, reedy, a little skinny guy with sticky-out ears who rejected food, a nuclear scientist from the moment he popped out of the womb. Nicky was calling him names. ‘Say that again,’ says Richard, aged five, ‘and I’ll smash you.’ Which made his younger brother, a three-year-old Goliath placidly minding his own business on the sidelines, perk up and take notice. Good, James thought. Because he knew what would happen next. Sure as night follows day. Spoiling for a fight and true to the bully’s code, Nicky said it again. Upon which Richard turned around and said imperiously: ‘James, go smash Nicky.’

In those days, everyone called him James.

I had seen one photograph of the two boys with their parents. It was taken at the old Belfast mill where Sam and Jane Grant had once laboured, and on the reverse John Grant had written in a shaky hand, ‘Apr 57, Jas, 2 1/2’. You could make out a grainy building, an overgrown dry-stone wall and the still powerful-looking wooden mill wheel. Audrey, on the left, is wearing a beret, set jauntily on her short brown curls. Front and centre is four-year-old Richard in a shirt and tie and belted overcoat and cap, with an alarmed expression, exactly as Lee had described him.

Lee had the long fingers of a musician, like he could cover a lot of keys on the piano. His hands weren’t as big as they looked in photographs, where against that stark inky backdrop of black T-shirt, black jacket and black jeans they drew the eye like a full moon in a starless night sky, but they were strong; those carefully manicured fingernails too, which grew so fast, especially on the index finger: he had to trim that one every day so he could carry on typing with it, and it doubled as a screwdriver when the need arose. His father told a story of how the young James, sitting on his lap, had once turned in a random movement and hit him in the mouth with his fist: ‘it was like being hit with a half-brick’. Another time, now an adult, Lee had been in a mountaineering shop and tested out a pair of hand-strengtheners displayed on the counter: he closed them instantly, something that should have taken months of rigorous training. He couldn’t understand the mentality of free-form climbers. ‘If I wanted to be at the top of a mountain I’d rent a helicopter.’ But he always won at the game of human handcuffs (which so far as I know he only ever played with his daughter Ruth).

‘I have unbelievably strong hands,’ Lee said.

It was a grey day when I first visited Coventry, catching an early train out of Euston. The long walk south from the station into thoroughly middle-class Stivichall took me past the landscaped gardens and spreading cedar trees of War Memorial Park, opened in name of the 2587 citizens lost in the First World War and studded with barrage balloons and anti-aircraft guns during the Second, past the Open Arms Public House and the Church of St James. It was April, and impossibly unblemished pom-poms of pink and white cherry blossom made up for the lack of sun. At the end of Ridgeway Avenue was another place of worship, the United Reformed Church, opposite a row of sleepy shops: an Indian takeaway, then a butcher, pharmacy, post office, beauty salon and convenience store. Much like Cherryvalley.

No. 20, on an upward-sloping bend, looked neglected. By rights there should have been a blue plaque above the white-painted front door, but instead there was only a blue-and-white ‘For Sale’ sign tamped down into the weed-strewn lawn alongside the weeping cherry and a red camellia. The neighbours had beds filled with flowering heather. The five-bedroom red-brick semi-detached house (extended since the 1950s) was on sale for £375,000, but I couldn’t help wondering how much more the owners might ask if only they knew. Maybe it wasn’t yet like visiting 125 Hyndford Street in East Belfast, where Van Morrison was born, or 251 Menlove Avenue in Liverpool, where John Lennon spent most of his childhood, but for his millions of readers it was surely close. I was tempted to knock on the door and say, did you know?

With certain notable exceptions Lee was unsentimental about family. The first thing he does in Killing Floor is kill them all off.

‘Have you got family?’ [Hubble] asked me.

‘No,’ I said. […] My parents were both dead. I had a brother somewhere who I never saw.

Reacher next sees his brother on a slab in the morgue.

The truth was I never knew for sure if I loved him or not. And he never knew for sure if he loved me or not, either. […] Most of those sixteen years, we didn’t know if we loved each other or hated each other.

But they had the thing that